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BASINSKI, WILLIAM - 92982

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: 2062 0901 Release Year: 2016 Note: re-issue of CD from 2009 with 4 long tracks, based on recordings dating back to 1982 => atmospheric drones of decay and nostalgia... *It is an extremely plastic and pliant piece of music, an eternally empty vessel that gets filled up from listen to listen.* [Pitchfork] BACK IN STOCK! Price (incl. 19% VAT): €16.00 More Info "This reissue of William Basinski's 2009 album finds the composer doing what he does best, creating haunting loops and drones that have a way of burrowing into your life. When you travel to 351 Jay Street on Google Maps you’re greeted with the image of a nondescript office building. On its ground floor is an art supply store. The rest of the scene is anonymous. Much of Downtown Brooklyn looks like 351 Jay: brutalist buildings of medium height that evoke industry and bureaucracy. Thirty-six years ago, in this building, William Basinski lived in a loft space that he called the Music Laboratories. He moved in at the beginning of the 1980s with his partner, the artist James Elaine. Most of the work Basinski released in the 2000s consisted of remixed, reworked, and wonderfully garbled homages to the archive he started to build in the Music Laboratories. While there he made hundred of tape loops, organizing the ribbons of magnetic tape on a tree branch he kept near his mixing desk. The loops were a combination of recordings of his own compositions and incidental noise that seemed to come his way from the whirl of urban life outside his window or from the whisper of radio broadcasts seeding themselves into his recording equipment. He didn’t release his experiments at the time, choosing to record, finagle, connect. The impulse was a natural reaction to the time and place, as he later said: “I was getting all this great stuff. It was just coming from the sky.” One day in September of 1982 he was experimenting on the fly, collecting fragments, and maybe hours later the backbone of a piece was made. He called it 92982, a clinical name designating the date of the composition, as if it was just a file to be tucked away. He released the recordings for the first time in 2009, long after he garnered widespread acclaim for his monumental 9/11 elegy The Disintegration Loops. Seven years after its initial release, 92982 has been remastered and reissued as 2xLP set of startlingly crisp and veritably haunted music. 92982 is over an hour long, and the original improvisation makes up the first two tracks, while the back half of the album includes an extended rework of a piano-based piece from Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive and another loop constructed from the 1982 material. Given the sources, the tracks present in 92982 seem almost unstuck from time, floating between dates and points of inspiration. The continual cutting up, editing, and processing of a tape loop was something closer to necromancy than normal composition. It’s a quality that actually infects the overall feeling of the music, creating an environment for free-floating listening. The album’s opening track, “92982.1,” drifts, separates, grows quiet, and then rumbles loudly. The wash of noises is teeming with potential, a quality that defines the inner workings of 92982. All four tracks are open canvases, they invite the rest of the world’s sounds to participate in making the experience of listening different each time. The sound of a helicopter whirling in the atmosphere and the Doppler splatter of a police car’s siren on “92982.2” mix into the sounds of banal moments, like laying in bed, listening to the buzz of an air conditioner, the honking of cars, the rustle of leaves, the drip of an open faucet. The drifting of “92982.4”’s piano loops hang like flickering presences hovering above a room. Overall, a disembodying and strange thing slowly happens as this album keeps playing: it sucks the noises of your environment into the loop. What’s contained here is sometimes not exactly a piece of music but an experiential filter. Basinski’s music is constantly toying with the idea that rote moments in life can be engulfed with emotion, and it has a way of burrowing into your life. As his perpetual loops drift across the surface of experience, they are incredibly porous, and invite a listener to complete them by taking a walk around their block or just go about their day. 92982 accomplishes this more successfully than much of Basinski’s work; compared to The Disintegration Loops, it’s more open to interpretation and devoid of the same weight of history or narrative. It is an extremely plastic and pliant piece of music, an eternally empty vessel that gets filled up from listen to listen." [Pitchfork] "These 4 tracks, built upon signature William Basinksi loops date back to September 29, 1982 (hence the title), and like so many of his recent releases of archival material, they ask the question, "why did it take you so long?" The answer may not be as interesting as the question itself, but the nostalgic look back for Basinski to his own past certainly resonates beyond any notions of solipsism and speaks to something downright universal: an optimism of a half-remembered past. Unlike the masterpiece of the Disintegration Loops, the tracks on 92982 don't crackle and crumble apart as the pieces move forward; but the dust, hiss, and fuzz that have been the trademarks of Basinski loops are all present. The first track centers on a loop of a spacious piano waltzing out of the softened drones of accumulated hiss and soft focus white noise pushed deep into the shadows. The second is a graceful swoon of a composition with delayed rhythmic pock that phases against a swelling ambient loop and occasional interjections of police sirens and helicopters, presumably recorded directly out of Basinski's open window. Another piano loop grounds the third track; this one painfully sad and lilting and made more so by the patina of tape hiss, soft static, and degradation of the source material. An elegant two note loop with a hallowed drone of floating dust completes yet another fantastic William Basinski record. Fans will not be disappointed!" [Aquarius Records review]